"The Yellow Wall Paper"
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Submitted by freefortermpapers on 06/24/2008 03:00 PM
- Category: Psychology
- Words: 364
- Pages: 2
- Views: 7
- Popularity Rank: 1018
"The Yellow Wall Paper"
The Yellow Wall-Paper" is a highly symbolic short story, that has intrigued many readers for more than a century. The main question asked is whether it is an account of a woman who is going insane, or a story of a woman who is trying to gain control over her life. The story's symbolism could cover both meanings. Even though it has been carefully constructed, its ending, and its final' meaning in particular have been the topic of lengthy discussions.
But let us first consider what happens in "The Yellow Wall-Paper". There is not much action in the physical sense. The personified narrator is a woman who has been told she should stay in bed. It is unclear what her illness is, and her husband, who is a doctor, thinks that her disease is mainly imaginary ("'she shall be as sick as she pleases!'"). Nevertheless, he has prescribed a period of complete passivity for her, so that she may recover. The woman, terming her illness "nervous troubles", does not feel that this cure will work.
It is important to realize that the narrator is writing, and not just speaking' or thinking'. We are not just reading an interior monologue. What we read is the result of the woman's forbidden activity, the writing of a journal or diary-like pages. To her husband, John, writing only stimulates his wife's "silly fancies", her "imaginative power and habit of story-making". One of those fancies is her being abhorred by the yellow wallpaper in the room she has to stay in. It has a pattern that more and more obsesses her. The pattern seems "pointless" to the woman, yet she wants to find out whether it does mean anything and starts to study it in the empty hours, day and night. She keeps a written account of her observations. Significantly, she notices that the pattern is not designed according to any formal or artistic principle; it seems rather grotesque and confusing. Moreover, at night she discovers a figure behind the pattern, a figure that slowly but surely becomes the...
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